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Seventeenth century Spain was notorious for the parsimony of its common diet: bread, beans, onions, a scrap of lamb or fish sometimes, and garlic, garlic, garlic. It was to French or Italian cooking what the crabby-looking servant girl grinding aioli in Diego Velazquez's Kitchen Scene with Christ in the House of Martha and Mary was to the sumptuous nudes of Titian or Veronese. A modern palate would recoil at the eggs slowly frying, or rather poaching, in oil on top of a clay stove in Velazquez's An Old Woman Cooking Eggs. But what an amazing act of skill the picture itself is, done in 1618 by a 19-year-old boy who wanted to display his total control over surface texture, form and light, from the transparency of the oil in which the eggs swim to the knife's curved shadow on a bowl to the marvelous fugue of circles and ellipses, melon and cooking vessels, that fills the lower third of the canvas.
The binding metaphor of 17th century still life was the vanitas, a term deriving from the text in Ecclesiastes, "Vanity of vanities, all is vanity." Such images were meant to show the fleeting nature of the world's goods, honors and sensual pleasures, setting them against the terrible perspective of death, time and judgment. They exemplified the desenga–o del mundo, "disillusionment of the world," that was one of the chief tropes of Spanish Baroque art and literature. They could be small and simple-three moldy skulls and a pocket watch-or fulsome in their cascade of lessons.
The near epic example of the latter is The Dream of the Knight, by the Madrid painter Antonio de Pereda (1611-78). The young Don sleeps, and an angel appears in his dream with a scroll bearing a diagram of death's arrow with the motto, "It pierces eternally, flies quickly and kills." Before the two figures is a tumbled mass of emblems of the world: armor and a wheel-lock gun (military glory), a bishop's miter and a papal tiara (religious authority), a laurel wreath (cultural fame), money, jewels, playing cards, sheet music-and a mirror that reflects only a skull.
Probably the best thing that can be said for the show's copious gallery of Madrid flowerpieces by Juan de Arellano and others from the late 17th century is that they are skilled exercises in a trivial genre; they descend from earlier Dutch conventions-those towering masses of tulips and roses, full of squishy virtuosity; but they lack the architectural grandeur of earlier Spanish works and promptly induce surfeit. After them, the Spanish still-life tradition nose-dived into academism and decor through the 18th century, with the single exception of the Madrid painter Luis Melendez (1716-80), whose massive arrays of boxes, wrinkled cheeses, copper cookware and glittering dorados or sea bream were disparaged as minor art by academic pooh-bahs and never won him the success he deserved. But other than France's Jean-Baptiste-Simeon Chardin, there was no finer still-life painter in 18th century Europe.
The climax of the show comes at the right place, its end, with four still lifes by Francisco de Goya. Because Goya was supremely a painter of the human clay in all its aspects, we don't associate him with still life. But his powers of empathy were so vast that he could endow almost anything with a shiver of mortality and the cold touch of otherness; and so it is with these paintings.